Ridenbaugh Press

One of the places where political contests traditionally have been influenced by individual judgments, community by community, has been the relatively low-key judicial race. If a contest - whether local or for a state supreme court - becomes a cause celebre, it tends to run on normal political tracks. But the low-key ones: How can most people realistically tell whether a judge is doing a good job or not, or whether a challenger might be better?

The traditional rule there is, a lot of people seek out or pay attention to what an attorney they know thinks about it.

That principle may just have gotten a big expansion. The Idaho State Bar has taken an unusual step into a judicial race, which judge may or may not like but which has some real public benefit: They polled attorneys to find out what they think about two contenders for the Idaho Supreme Court this year incumbent Joel Horton and challenger (and 2nd District Judge) John Bradbury.

That race has been quiet, though there are elements of interest: Bradbury, for example, would like to see a prohibition on judges who are appointed to the office - which is most of them - from running for a full term from the position of incumbency. (Bradbury’s web site includes a fine YouTube clip in which he simply explains his reasons for running.) But few voters probably know enough about either candidate to have a basis for judging.

The Bar survey, which is available on line, doesn’t come with analysis: The Bar (wisely) withheld an assessment. It did note that 4,130 surveys were sent and 437 came back from attorneys.

And what did they conclude? The difference between the two was not drastic, but Horton’s numbers were generally better, almost across all categories and regions of the state.

As the incumbent, he probably has an edge anyway. But the survey may give Idaho voters at least some basis for making a decision - some basis that has something to do with the work a judge does.

The announcement by Areva corporation that it wants to build a uranium-enrichment plant, estimated to cost $2 billion, west of Idaho Falls, could be a good thing for eastern Idaho. The mere possibility that it might not seems not to have been discussed, pretty much at all. Idaho’s elected officials seem in a permanent come-hither mode as regards businesses moving in; often the news really does signify something good, but the blanket assumption can cover a range of problem areas.

Enthusiasm over the possible plant construction has been ongoing for months, even before the Idaho Legislature passed and dangled a major tax break - let’s be plain, that means a shift in taxes to other, already-present Idahoans - to lure it. The announcement press release went out under the cover of the governor and the region’s congressional delegation - all wanted to get a say in. “Phenomenal news,” “a natural fit,” and so on.

This may be a good thing. Some hundreds of jobs will be created, and they are likely to pay well, no small consideration.

But the public hasn’t seen a whole lot more than that; a lot of obvious questions haven’t been much asked. (Here’s one from the underground.) Areva will be engaging in uranium enrichment; what exactly will be entailed? Might more tasks be added, or changed? What are the implications of Areva’s ownership - which is, in an area not culturally thrilled with France in recent years, the French government? What are the environmental considerations; where will the waste go?

(A shorthand description from Wikipedia: “a French public multinational industrial conglomerate that deals in energy, especially nuclear power. It was created on 3 September, 2001, by the merger of Framatome and Cogema (now AREVA NC). Its main shareholder is the French owned company CEA, but the German company Siemens also retains 34% of the shares of AREVA’s subsidiary, AREVA NP, in charge of building the European Pressurized Reactor. The parent company is incorporated under French law as a société anonyme (SA - public corporation). The French State owns more than 90%.”) It does have close ties to the Bush Administration, which we know because its U.S. subsidiary is now led by former Bush Administrator Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham. What implications all that may have, we don’t know.

Guess we’ll find out.

Calling $2.26/gallon gasoline “cheap”, as the Walt Minnick campaign does, seems a little odd to those of us accustomed to filling our tanks for a lot less. But then, these things are relative.

Which means he’ll probably get plenty of takers. From a Minnick press release:

Tomorrow Bill Sali will sit down to a $1,000-per-plate fundraiser for his campaign, a fundraiser hosted by oil lobbyists.
While Bill is busy raking in money from the very people getting filthy rich off high prices, Idahoans are spending their hard-earned paychecks on high prices at the pump!
“Idahoans are being pummeled at the pump while their congressman ishobnobbing with the very people who are getting filthy rich from high gas prices,” Walt said in a press release today. “Sali should be taking a tough stance with the oil lobbyists, not looking to them for a handout.”
It’s an egregious example of what’s wrong in Washington. That’s why, while Sali is lunching and lounging in D.C. with “big oil,” Walt will be pumping gas in Boise.
Regular gasoline at the Cole Village Chevron is currently $3.59 per gallon. From 10 to 11 a.m. on Tuesday, the station will sell regular for $2.26 a gallon, the price it was when Sali first took office. The Minnick for Congress campaign will pay the difference.

One of the things you can do if you have, as Minnick does, an ample campaign treasury.

Sali is not one of the top recipients of oil and gas money, but he has received substantial funds from that sector. In addition to individuals in the field, he’s gotten money in the 2008 cycle from the American Gas Association ($1,000), Chevron Corp. ($2,000), Exxon Mobil ($2,000), Halliburton Co. ($1,000), Independent Petroleum Assn of America ($2,500), Koch Industries ($2,500), Marathon Oil ($1,000), Mid-Continent Oil & Gas Association ($1,000), Occidental Petroleum ($2,000), Valero Energy ($2,000), Williams Companies ($1,000). In fact, opensecrets.org lists oil and gas as Sali’s top business sector for contributions.

The editorial page at the Lewiston Tribune has been - has been literally for decades - one of the region’s newspaper treasures: Uncommonly sharply and brightly written editorials, two of them a day, and a solid roster of columns. They’ve been a mainstay of ours since the early 70s.

The paper’s editorial output (it’s behind a pay wall, which is why we’re not linked to it) will still be a mainstay, but it will be diminished. The page’s editor, Jim Fisher, ran today what he described as his last column. The page’s staff, which has been two people these many decades (not many papers the Trib’s size have had as many), has been cut in half - Fisher’s workload is abruptly increased, though his column is going away, as are half of more of those superbly-written editorials. Editorial writer Tom Henderson (previously of western Oregon), is departing. It’s the widespread story: Industry cutbacks, bad finances. And this wasn’t some greedy out of state corporation doing it, either: The Trib is locally owned, family owned, and the man in charge (A.L. “Butch” Alford) is the same man who’s been proudly running it for a very long time. You can only imagine how he feels about this, or what conditions must be that it had to happen.

What’s happening to newspapers has a real cost. Here’s one of them.

Tribal casinos around the Northwest are a varied lot. Some of them are large scale operations, smaller than a large Vegas casino but still big enough to support large hotels (the Grand Ronde, the Coeur d’Alene, among others). But some of them are small-scale operations, like the little (and barely remembered) casino at Burns.

Fort Hall in eastern Idaho, between Pocatello and Idaho Falls (close to 200,000 people live within 50 miles or so), is on the smaller side, its casino near the reservation’s main community focusing principally on bingo. You have to figure tribal leaders have been thinking expansion for some time. Apart from the nearby population base, there’s solid road transport (it’s near the merger of Interstates 86 and 15), and the nearest sizable casinos are about 150 miles away, at Jackpot, Nevada. If it became more of a destination point, it could draw strong Utah traffic.

The tribe said today that it plans a major expansion of just that sort - an 80-acre resort including a hotel with 200 rooms (which will make it one of the largest in eastern Idaho), a golf course, a water park (out in the desert) and more. Work on it is expected to begin in a few months. (Since this is all happening on reservation land, regulatory hurdles should be minor.)

This may be on the short list of big stories of the year for eastern Idaho. It could change the dynamic of the reservation and its relationship with the communities in the area.

The metric shouldn’t be overstated - we say here over and over that while money is important in political campaigns, it isn’t all, and candidates outspent by their opponents win more often than you would think.

Still, a chart of House races - races involving an incumbent seeking re-election, not an open seat - comparing candidates’ cash on hand (according to the most recent reports), got our attention. (It was compiled at the website Swing State Project.) That’s partly because of the race at the very top of the list nationally, the number one race for a challenger with much more cash on hand than the incumbent:

Idaho’s 1st District, where Democrat Walt Minnick has $327,909 on hand, to incumbent Republican Bill Sali’s $124,191 - 264% more. Only one other race in the country (in a Texas district) has nearly so large a challenger advantage.

However, in fourth place on the list, we do find another Northwest race: Democrat Darcy Burner, with $921,615 on hand, to incumbent Republican Dave Reichert’s $698,035, in the Washington 8th.

There are just 10 races in the country featuring an challenger who has more money banked than does the incumbent; those are the only two in the Northwest.

The newly newspaper-less counties in Idaho who just got word their weeklies in Shoshone and Rupert will be closed, might have another option. Over in western Washington, the same thing just happened to the small community of Orting. There, the locals didn’t just sit still for it: They up and created their own new online newspaper, with contributions from the editor of the old print version.

Via Olympia Time, we were interested to read an early edition of the new effort, the Orting News. Some Idahoans might want to swing by as well.

Remember local, home-grown radio? It wasn’t all that long ago such a thing was commonly accepted; nowadays, it’s almost forgotten.

But now it could happen. The Boise Community Radio Project has just passed a major hurdle, getting radio transmission permission from the Federal Communications Commission, on FM frequency 89.9. They’re not on air yet, but the main obstacles remaining are mechanical and financial, and really of a smaller scale than what they just surmounted.

A local option for Boise listeners. In recent years, that qualifies as news.

Two parts to this: The sale and the closures. The first probably is (on balance) more improvement than wash; the second is simply sad.

The paper sold is the Wood River Journal, the weekly at prosperous Hailey (though it competes with another substantial paper, the Idaho Mountain Express, just a few miles away at Ketchum). For many years locally owned, the Journal was sold in 2004 to Lee Enterprises, which also owns the dailies in Twin Falls and Burley and most of the other newspapers in the Magic Valley. The new deal sells it to a group of several owners, but the lead participant and manager will be the Post Company, whose best-known property is the Post-Register daily at Idaho Falls.

Newspapering in Idaho east of Boise has been slipping into ever fewer hands. Once highly diverse - just a generation ago the bulk of these papers were in separate ownerships - now nearly all are in the hands of Lee, Post or Pioneer Newspapers (which have the papers at Pocatello, Rexburg, Nampa, and Logan, Utah, among others). In one sense, the new Journal deal just moves the Hailey property from one big owner to another. But locals will be among the owners, and Post still is based in Idaho, at Idaho Falls. So that probably qualifies as a net plus. (Plus there’s the point that Post generally puts more resources into its news operations.)

The sad news is Lee’s announcement at about the same time of the shutdown of two of its weekly papers, the Lincoln County Journal at Shoshone and the Minidoka County News at Rupert, adding two to the Idaho counties unserved by a local paper. Minidoka County has a population of about 20,000. (As a technical matter, we should note that a slice of the city of Burley, the county seat of Cassia County, is located in Minidoka; but the daily there is based in Cassia.)

The closures were attributed to weak circulation and advertising bases.

We’ve generally been mostly positively impressed by the move over the last decade of so many congressional offices across the region from federal buildings to private office buildings.

There have been some real pluses. As an internal matter, those federal buildings were often tight for space and had poor electric, telecom and other resource access, so the new spaces were usually a big improvement for the staffs and for efficiency. From the public’s standpoint, as the Idaho Falls Post-Register’s Marty Trillhaase writes in an editorial today (the article is behind a pay wall), the federal offices were often “security-ridden” - constituents seeking help from their congressional offices would often be treated like prospective terrorists, and neither the constituents nor members of Congress much liked that.

There is a potential glitch, though, in using private property: The property owner does have a right to set terms and conditions for use of the property. In Idaho Falls, where Senators Larry Craig and Mike Crapo and Representative Mike Simpson have offices, that building is owned by a fellow Republican, attorney Blake Hall. When Iraq war protesters sought to carry their message to their members of Congress, and picketed their offices (all three have been strong war supporters), Blake ordered them evicted.

Trillhaase: “However anomalous Tuesday’s episode, it has exposed a precedent. What happens the next time a landlord decides to block people protesting immigration policies or salmon restoration, for instance, from petitioning the congressional offices in his building?”

Simpson and Crapo are reported to be reviewing the situation with Hall, and Simpson particularly seems to get the point, saying that either his offices are open to the public (including protesters) or “I will begin considering my options for alternative office space.”

The point to draw the line seems clear enough. It doesn’t really lie with property owners like Hall. Rather, government agencies should operate under rules which require that any space leases they execute must allow for free public access, period. As open as the federal buildings used to be.

BY THE WAY If you know anything about how thoroughly connected to Idaho Republican politics Blake Hall is, you have recognize how uncommonly cozy this particular lease arrangement looks.

The Mountain Goat Report has put together a succinct rundown of the primary contributors to Idaho Republican Representative Bill Sali (the leading subject of observation by that well-crafted blog).

In looking at a list like this, something of a middling view is required. It isn’t a list of buyers of votes; specific quid pro quos (which would amount to bribery) are unusual, and there’s reason to suspect that here. On the other hand, PR explanations that these contributions are simply a support of good government are, yes, as ridiculous as they sound. Think of these endorsements instead as a sort of free-floating investment, a loose expectation that the recipient (partly because of the largesse and partly for other reasons) is likely to be amenable more often than not to what the contributor may need.

So the question worth asking is, in this case, what might such contributors as Washington Group International, the American Bankers Association and the National Rifle Association (and smaller contributors as R.J. Reynolds and Halliburton) - all these through their PACs, of course - might be asking of Representative Sali, that maybe a different representative might be less inclined to support. And their other donation recipients.

We’ll be spotlighting some more of these contribution lists later. For now, Mountain Goat’s makes good review.

Financial shifts, and even reversals, sometimes can hold more than one interpretation. Shifts in funding streams and debt repayment can just relate to changes in business conditions; even bankruptcy can simply be a tool used toward rebuilding a troubled business into a sounder one (which happened at one point with the business that used to be Morrison-Knudsen at Boise). So we’ve held off saying much, not being pricy to the inner workings.

The news today that Tamarack Resort is shutting down its Boise operations - substantial, since about 20 employees are directly affected - is another matter. We’re seeing here an unambiguous indicator of serious trouble.

For more on the developing attitudes, check out the Idaho Statesman’s comment section on this.

This sort of thing can happen easily enough anywhere, and you have to give Idaho Secretary of State Ben Ysursa credit for stepping up, declining to prevaricate and declaring simply: “We got conned.”

That was done by a federal prison inmate in Texas named Keith Russell Judd, who filed a notorized form and $1,000 to secure a place on the Idaho ballot - for president, on the Democratic side.

It doesn’t matter practically much, as Ysura pointed out: Idaho Democrats register their choice for president by caucus, and the primary vote will be irrelevant anyway.

But maybe this does help make the case for a suggestion we’ve mulled for some years: Require that all candidates for the ballot have to submit at least some reasonable number of petition signatures along with the declaration form and filing fee. Might cut down on the number of California residents (see the ballot in the 1st district) and prison inmates hitting the Idaho ballot. As a news story on the Judd case said, “A key reason Judd was able to make the ballot was a recent change in state election law that eliminated a requirement under which he would have had to get signatures from more than 3,000 Idaho citizens.”

Question arose in comments a couple of days ago which suggests something more than a quick reply: “I’d just be interested in any history you have on the chances of a challenger beating a weak incumbent in a rematch (as a Grant-Sali race would have been) versus a new candidate taking out the incumbent.”

That had to do with a post on the 1st district U.S. House race, where the Democratic field shrunk from two candidates to one. The departed was Larry Grant, who ran against Republican Bill Sali two years ago and was hoping for a rematch. Still standing, and now the presumptive Democratic nominee, is Walt Minnick, who has not run for this office before but did run for U.S. Senate in 1996.

The question breaks into two parts, one having to do with beating incumbents, the other concerning whether rerunners might be better positioned to do it.

It’s hard to get scientific about this because the data is pretty small - in most places around the country in recent years, and certainly in Idaho. The reality is that not many incumbents lose anymore, either in primary or general elections. Some do, as a number of Republican U.S. House members found out in 2006 (or Democrats in 1994). But it’s unusual. (more…)

Over the course of a lot of years, we’ve talked to a lot of Republican Idaho elected officials who in no way wanted a closed primary (of the sort Oregon has, where you have to declare party affiliation to vote in a party’s primary). The fat is now burning. From an e-mailed state GOP release on Friday:

The Idaho Republican Party filed suit late Friday in U.S. District Court for the District of Idaho against the Idaho Secretary of State, in an effort to close the party’s primary elections process, so only registered Republicans would be allowed to vote in Republican primaries.

“The party presently has expressed its choice to implement closed primary elections, and we have taken concrete action to carry out these wishes,” said Sidney Smith, Executive Director of the Idaho Republican Party. “We hope this suit will move quickly through the process and lead to an effective structure that respects the rights of our party members.”

This session, the legislature did not implement an appropriate closed primary system such as the “call for ballot” process. The Idaho Republican Party urged the legislature to approve closed primary legislation this year, in order to avoid litigation, but several proposals were unsuccessful.

Therefore, according to the resolution approved by the party Central Committee in January of this year, the party was required to file suit within 10 days of adjournment of the legislature, thereby making this suit unavoidable.

Won’t affect this year’s primary, the calendar being too late for a serious change now. But it could - who knows? - have some effect on this year’s politics . . .

Former Governor Cecil Andrus, who in 2006 supported Larry Grant for the U.S. House and this year supports his primary opponent, Walt Minnick, for the job, played master of ceremonies at the downtown Boise press conference at which Grant announced he is pulling out of this year’s race. With the earlier departure from the contest of Rand Lewis, that gives Minnick the direct shot at the nomination.

Andrus mentioned in passing that he’d just learned of Grant’s decision today, but thin rumors were floating around Boise yesterday. There were matters of timeliness. One was that, as Grant said, the time was about to arrive when the candidates would need to get into doing comparatives against each other - some sort of attack, direct or subtle. If Democrats wanted to avoid that, now would be the time for dropout. There’s also word that Minnick’s fundraising - expected to be released within a few days - has gone well, crossing the half-million line and running ten times or more what Grant has raised so far. There’s also the point, raised at the press conference, that the national Democratic Party has targeted the Idaho 1st this year, but couldn’t get involved while the primary contest was ongoing. So this could bring them in earlier.

A piece of this probably does have to do with joining forces; Grant could have done a separate withdrawal rather than the joint appearance and endorsement he did do. (After the press conference, Minnick and Grant and for a while Andrus repaired to a nearby coffee shop and spent a considerable time in apparently detailed discussions.) That would seem to suggest that, rhetoric notwithstanding, the Democrats do recognize that their target, Republican Representative Bill Sali, will be very tough to take out. And he will - barring some sea change in the ground-level structure of Idaho politics, there’s not a lot of good reason for thinking Sali will fail to at least match his vote results from last time.

But there is, evidently, a certain amount of discipline on the Democratic side, which would be a first step toward shifting the environment. That and focus: Minnick vs. Sali, a battle of extremely different people.

Glen Taylor

You can still run into Idaho people who recall Glen Taylor, a U.S. senator from 1945-51, who will write him off as an embarrassment or worse. Cecil Andrus, who years later would enter politics and become governor, recalled that as a young man he saw Taylor come through town and do his stand-up campaigning bit, and thinking that if this was what politics was, he wanted no part of it.

Taylor was by profession an entertainer, a singer and dancer and skit player in the old traveling show circuit that began to die out with the coming of talkie movie theatres. But he was also substantive, a true ideologue (probably the closest to a true socialist Idaho ever sent to Congress) and surprisingly substantive. And politically courageous besides.

Which is by way of seconding College of Idaho Professor Jasper LiCalzi’s suggestion of Taylor’s memoir, The Way It Was With Me, as a good read. Taylor was as entertaining a writer as he must have been on stage, and he includes tales that could only have been told by someone who knew his political career was far behind him, and who had moved for good from the state where he ran. LiCalzi remarks in his blog post that “This is the most enjoyable political memoir I have ever read but it is the person that is most fascinating.” Not hard to feature (even if the book may not be especially easy to find).

Snow in the Blue Mountains Tuesday/Stapilus

So when is this winter thing supposed to be over? Heading into the Blue Mountains Tuesday - and yes, this is the Blues but still, this was April 8 - was heading into snow, then slush, then snowpack, and for about a quarter-hour near the top, genuine blizzard with the snow solidly horizontal. The trucks were spooked. So ws most everyone else.

So much for a nice pleasant April drive.

First chore headed out this morning in Boise was to scrape an inch-plus of snow off the car. (After hearing reports about rough travel to the northwest through Snoqualmie.)

The snow hasn’t stuck. But hey. This is supposed to be April.

Some credit to Idaho Governor C.L. “Butch” Otter, for owning up. Some governors in his position might bluff through, saying the last legislative session was just fine; or might fuzz over the fault in lack of progress in a long list of key areas (transportation being a big one Otter was working on directly).

Otter acknowledges that he - his relations with the legislature - are part of the reason for all that. And in fact, the fault is best spread around; there’s a tendency to focus on one easily identifiable person when large-scale things happen, but usually a lot of people are involved. As here.

Having said all that, Otter has been going public recently with quite a few statements blasting away at legislators. And you have to wonder, with two rocky sessions now under his belt, if session 3 is going to be a lot different.

We’ve never taken any particular conceptual issue with some of the hot developments in public education over the last decade, notably charter schools and virtual (or on-line) schools. Too much of public education is too bureaucratized; done right, some of these new developments could bring spring air into the system. If, of course, they’re done right; and ho well they’ve been doing is a fair question.

The Twin Falls Times News gets into some of this with a valuable lead article today pointed out how little oversight - apparently, almost none - there is of the state’s virtual schools, and of the state (taxpayer) money being spent on them.

Four online charter schools serving about 1 percent of the state’s public school students received about $10.8 million in public money for the 2007-08 school year.

But the schools combined spent only about 58 percent of the money on administration, instruction and related expenses, according to records from the State Department of Education.

Unlike other schools, virtual charter schools are allowed to keep what they don’t spend, which totaled about $4.58 million - and the State Department of Education isn’t following the money trail.

“The state does not track how schools spend the funding if they choose not to spend it on staff,” state Department of Education Spokeswoman Melissa McGrath told the Times-News.

All of which logically ought to be of great interest to Idaho taxpayers.